A journey stage is a label for what a page is for in your funnel. Not what it is about — that is what labels do — but which part of a reader’s decision it is written to serve. You define the vocabulary once, tag each page with one stage, and the map that falls out tells you where your content is thin long before your pipeline does.
Two screens are involved and nothing else: Settings → Journey stages defines the vocabulary, and the Journey field in the editor’s Page settings tab applies it to a page.
Defining your stages
Open Settings from the bottom of the left rail, then the Content model group, then the Journey stages card — described there as “Awareness → Consider → Decide funnel stages.” The route is /settings/journey.
You do not start from nothing. The first time anyone in your workspace opens this screen, Leed writes three starter stages and saves them:
| Stage | The description Leed ships with it |
|---|---|
| Awareness | Problem Identification — “We need to do something.” |
| Consideration | Solution Exploration — “What’s out there to solve our problem?” |
| Preference | Vendor Selection — “Does this do what we want it to?” |
Those are a starting point, not a schema. Rename them, rewrite the descriptions, delete the ones that do not fit and add your own — teams selling to existing customers commonly add a fourth stage such as Adoption or Onboarding for documentation and getting-started content, and teams with a long evaluation cycle often split Preference into Evaluation and Decision. There is no fixed vocabulary and no maximum.
The controls are deliberately plain:
- The New Journey input at the top adds a stage. Type a name, add it, and a card appears at the bottom of the list.
- Each stage card has a Name field and a Description textarea. Both autosave about a second after you stop typing, and again when the field loses focus. There is no Save button and no draft state.
- The trash icon on a card deletes the stage, behind a confirmation reading Delete Journey — Are you sure you want to delete this journey? This cannot be undone.
Deleting a stage does not go back and clear it from the pages that carry it; those pages keep a reference to a stage that no longer exists, and their Journey selector will show nothing selected. If you are reorganizing your funnel, rename stages rather than deleting and recreating them — a rename keeps every page’s tag intact.
Stage changes are not publish-tracked. There is no pending change to deploy, nothing appears on the Deploy tab, and nothing is written to your site repository — which follows from what a stage is for, covered next.
Assigning a stage to a page
Open a page in the Design workspace, then the Page settings tab in the right rail. Journey is the last field in the Page Details group, directly below Labels and a little way under Page Type and Form. It is a single-select: one stage per page, or the blank - entry for no stage at all. The choice saves as you make it, like every other field in that tab.
Page settings covers the rest of that tab, including the neighboring fields that do reach your published site.
How a lead’s stage is read
Leed does not compute a funnel position for a person from your page tags. There is no field on a contact that says “this lead is in Consideration because they read three Consideration pages.” What you get is the raw material: Leed records which pages each lead viewed, session by session, and your stage tags tell you what each of those pages was for.
So the reading is yours to make, and it is usually obvious once the pages are tagged. Somebody whose last three sessions moved from your awareness posts to pricing and a case study is telling you something that a list of page titles does not. The activity timeline you read it from is on lead profiles and visitor identity.
Journey stages as a content-planning tool
The aggregate view is the one most teams get more out of. Group your pages by stage and the shape of your content program is immediately visible: thirty awareness posts and two decision pages is not a coverage problem you have to argue about, it is a count. The same map tells you which stage a new brief belongs to before anyone writes it.
An AI client working in your workspace can read the stage list, so it can plan against the same vocabulary you do — ask it what your funnel is missing and the answer is grounded in your stage names and descriptions rather than in a generic marketing model.
Two different journeys — read this before you get confused
Leed has two unrelated things called a journey, and they use overlapping words. The one this page is about is yours. The other one belongs to Engage, is computed rather than configured, and never looks at your stage list.
| Aspect | Your journey stages | Engage’s buying journey |
|---|---|---|
| Who defines it | You | Leed — it is a fixed enum in the product |
| Where it lives | Settings → Journey stages | Nowhere you can edit; it is derived |
| How many values | As many as you like | Exactly four: awareness, consideration, evaluation, decision |
| What it is attached to | A page | A contact and an account |
| How a value is assigned | You pick one in the page’s Page settings tab | Computed from the contact’s readiness and intent scores |
| What reads it | You, and AI clients working in your workspace | The Engage contact and account screens, filters and facets |
| Can you change it | Freely — rename, add, delete | No. Not the names, not the count, not the thresholds |
Your journey stages
Yours are a vocabulary you author, attached to pages, describing what a page is for. Nothing computes them and nothing validates them: the list is whatever you typed, and a page carries one of your entries or none. Everything above this section is about these.
Engage’s buying journey
Engage’s is a fixed four-value enum built into the product — awareness, consideration, evaluation, decision — attached to contacts and accounts, and it is derived rather than chosen. The value comes from whichever of a contact’s readiness and intent scores is higher: 75 or above reads as decision, 50 or above as evaluation, 25 or above as consideration, and anything below that as awareness. It is recomputed as those scores move, and it drives the stage pills, filters and facets on the Engage screens. Engage scores explains what feeds the scores.
The practical consequence of the two existing side by side: naming one of your own stages Evaluation does not make Engage use it, and renaming your stages does not change a single contact’s Engage stage. They are two vocabularies that happen to share three words.
Journey attribution
Attribution and your stage tags answer adjacent questions — which channel brought someone in, and what kind of content they read once they arrived — and are most useful read together. Journeys, funnels and attribution covers the analytics side, including which figures are gated and which are free.
Working with stages from an AI client
An MCP client connected to Leed has two tools here, and the gap between them is worth knowing before you write a prompt that assumes otherwise. list_journey_stages returns every stage with its name and description. update_journey_stage edits one stage by id — its name, its description, or both. There is no create tool and no delete tool; the tool description says so in as many words. Adding or removing a stage is done on this screen. MCP tools for site structure sets out the whole surface.